“Can you show me? Please?”
She and Joe exchanged looks, and then stood and led me to one of the study carrels. A girl sat there, tapping into the keyboard. The site in front of her looked like it belonged to a pop group. She hastily clicked the screen empty as we approached and gave up her spot without argument.
“Do you remember what he was looking for?” I asked.
Milah frowned. “A genealogy project, wasn’t it?”
We gathered around the empty carrel, Milah leaning into the keyboard. “He was researching some distant relatives. Cousins.”
“He doesn’t have any cousins,” I said.
“Well,” Milah said slowly. “Everyone has some cousins. Down the line.”
“We don’t.” Of course it wasn’t true. “How would he have started? Wouldn’t he have started with a name or something concrete? How do you do this?”
“Well, he could have started with himself.” Milah tapped a few keys, Joshua’s name appearing in the search box. When the results came up, she ran her finger down the few entries, tried a few more keystrokes. “But he doesn’t have a web presence that I can see. Good for you. He’s too young. Or he could have started with you. Your name is—”
I hesitated, glancing at Joe. Then gave the name I went by. No reason to call up the old newspaper stories now.
Milah typed my name, tapped around.
“You’re not here, either.” She shot me a look of renewed interest. In this day and age, it must be unusual not to come rising to the surface when someone tried to fish you out.
Joe shifted impatiently. “I’m just not sure how this is relevant.”
I didn’t want it to be relevant, either, but it was. I was willing to admit it now.
“Try this name,” I said, saying it aloud for the first time in thirteen years. And spelling it the way I had for Joshua, the wrong way, the just-in-case way.
Chapter Twenty-six
Eliot Ray Levis. One l, one t. Sometimes he got mail addressed to Elliott, two l’s, two t’s, and it pissed him off. Or Lebis. Or Leeves, Leaves, Levi. What does that say? he’d crow, holding the offending catalog or envelope to my face. How can they get away with being so wrong all the time?
Milah clicked around on a few things then looked back at me. “Not much on that guy, either. I don’t think Joshua would have the skills or the credit card to take this search as deep as you’d need to go. Some real estate stuff . . . nothing new, at least.”
I let out the breath I was holding but didn’t feel any better. I had to catch her attention before her search dug up thirteen-year-old headlines or chat rooms. “How could Joshua have spent all his library time on this if we’re coming up tilt within ten minutes?”
“Oh, I didn’t say he spent all of his time on this,” she said, finally closing that search window and looking away from the screen. “He mostly used the reference section, which is why I noticed him specifically.” She glanced at Joe. “They don’t usually bother with the dusty side of the room.”
“Reference section . . . like encyclopedias?”
Milah stood up and started toward the table we’d left earlier. Behind it, a wide array of books: thick, tall, old. “I think he was more interested in—”
She stopped.
“—maps.”
I ARRIVED HOME without paying attention to how I got there. Underneath my skin, my veins thumped. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t stop thinking.
Maps.
But where was he going? No one had thought to ask, to look over his shoulder to see what trip he was planning.
Jeffries had gone and fetched the boys: Steve, Shay Mullen, another boy from the pack I’d seen on the courthouse lawn. Stephanie’s kid, Caleb.
“He was always talking about Chicago,” Shay said. His mouth didn’t open very wide when he talked. I leaned in to hear better. “But then it was all about some woodsy place? Remember?” he put this to Steve. “He wanted to go camping?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. He seemed embarrassed to talk to me now. The French fries, probably. I’d hurt his pride, even if I’d cured his stomach illness.
“Where?” I said, my heart in my throat.
“I can look it up when I get home,” Shay said.
“How will you look it up?”
“Online,” he said. “On the chat on low keys revenge.”
“Two?” Steve said.
“Yeah,” Shay said, flipping his hair out of his eyes and pulling up the waistband of his too-tight jeans.
“What? What’s low keys revenge?”
“Lo-ki,” Shay enunciated. Someone across the room shushed him. “The god of mischief. Loki’s Revenge.”
“Two,” Steve said. “The next generation of the game.”
“Oh, it’s a game,” I said. “And it’s online? But Joshua doesn’t have online access.”
“Yeah, he does,” Steve said, that hiss escaping him again.
“He plays all the time,” Shay said.
“And there’s a chat,” Caleb said. “You know, where you can talk on the screen with the guys you’re playing with. All over. Not just in Parks. Not just your friends, I mean.”
His game system?
“But he didn’t have online access at our place—”
“The neighbor,” Caleb said. “Really easy. One of your neighbors doesn’t keep their network locked down.”
And here I thought I’d been the one running a secret online enterprise from our apartment.
“When he talked about going somewhere, going camping,” I said, “did he mention anyplace in particular?” I glanced at Joe, then Milah. “Did he mention Wisconsin? Sweetheart Lake?”
Shay looked at me sharply. “Yeah, that’s it.”
Funny how the name of the place stuck in your head once you heard it. The boys confirmed they’d all heard that name, that maybe Joshua had been looking it up online during one of those library hours, too.
Now, driving home, I raged at myself. How had I wasted a minute trying to pretend I didn’t know where Joshua had gone? He’d gone to find Ray. Of course he had. The police had asked. Russ had leveled with me. I wouldn’t let them consider the possibility, because I’d hoped it wasn’t true. Because my only hope was that it wasn’t true. Because it didn’t seem possible. Joshua couldn’t go to his dad’s because he didn’t have one. A dad? That was the stuff of greeting cards and sitcom TV. Joshua didn’t have a dad. Neither of us did, not anymore, and we were both better off for it.
When I pulled up in front of our building, Russ was standing outside. He didn’t have his hat.
“Been looking for you,” he said.
My hands began to shake so badly I had to grip them together. Just like everyone else, expecting the worst. “Joshua?”